Acapulco Gold Rush

Last weekend my wife was seized by an unwholesome enthusiasm for tiny houses. She’d read they were featured at something called a Better Living Show and wanted to go.

That’s what they call them, tiny houses; and in the truth-in-naming department you can’t do much better than that. Tiny houses are two-hundred-square-foot jobs, conveniently sized to fit into a single parking space. Except, if you lived in a parking space you’d have more room because you wouldn’t have to share your living quarters with a furnace and a water heater.

Tiny houses are the city of Portland’s newest, most environmentally correct way of encouraging neighborliness and doing something about urban sprawl at the same time. “Infill” is the word the planners use to justify them: 11, maybe 20 of the things bumper to bumper on a standard neighborhood lot. A business opportunity is what my wife called them. We could crowd a few dozen in the backyard, charge rent, and kayak the income stream into a comfortable old age.

The stuff isn’t even legal until July, yet here we were at a staid Better Living Show browsing booths filled with bongs and vaporizers and rolling papers and roach clips.

Marriages being what they are, we headed over to the Better-Living-in-the-Shanty-Town-of-the-Future Show, got out of the car, made our way on foot to where the parking lot receded over the curve of the earth, spotted a crowd, followed it into a warehouse-like building and found . . . marijuana paraphernalia. In fact, the first aisle was nothing but marijuana paraphernalia, display after display of the kind of things that would get you busted at any airport in America. Better living indeed.

Interesting, we thought, how quickly the free market kicked into gear once Oregon passed its marijuana initiative last fall. The stuff isn’t even legal until July, yet here we were at a staid Better Living Show browsing booths filled with bongs and vaporizers and rolling papers and roach clips. And it wasn’t just paraphernalia. One particularly popular young lady was pushing samples of what she billed as “medicine-free” edibles. Not that you can’t get edibles with medicine right now, just not at a recreational-use booth. Medical marijuana has been legal for decades but, until July, you will still need a prescription to indulge in recreational munchies.

In the next aisle orchids were being ultra-violated in the sort of high-tech grow-box you see in movies about space stations. Orchids, we thought. Now that we’ve found the more traditional part of the Better Living Show, can tiny houses be far away?

Turned out they could. It also turned out that the grow-box wasn’t meant for orchids. The orchids were nothing more than body doubles for the medicinal herbs that were meant to go in the grow-box but, like the medicine for the munchies, were biding their time until July. Next to the grow-box were shelves of seedless seed packets bearing the names of every imaginable variety of the scientifically engineered seeds you could grow in the grow box, just as soon as July rolls around and the seed packets contain seeds.

It began to dawn on us that, maybe, the better living show we’d arrived at wasn’t the same Better Living Show advertised in the paper. Sometimes we can be pretty insightful.

“This is the Oregon Cannabis Convention & Trade Show,” a nice young man informed us. “Better Living Show is the next building over. Building after that is the Gold & Treasure Show.”

Gold & Treasure? I thought. Gold and treasure is even better than marijuana paraphernalia. The Internet will send marijuana paraphernalia right to my home, but gold and treasure? Not even the most desperately dispossessed Nigerian widow ever came through with any of that. We headed over to the Gold & Treasure Show.

You had to go through a metal detector and check your guns before they’d let you in. I saw that as a favorable sign, a promise that we were about to be ushered into Aladdin’s cave. Or, and this is a particular fantasy of mine, Uncle Scrooge’s money bin.

Tiny houses are a lot more honest about what they call themselves than that Gold & Treasure Show. At the Gold & Treasure Show there was no treasure and not much more gold than there was marijuana at the marijuana show . . . and gold has been legal since the early ’70s. A couple of guys at out-of-the-way tables were pushing run-of-the-mill coins at about 30% more than you could get them for at any gold shop in town, which may say something about who they thought would be attending the show.

In the next aisle orchids were being ultra-violated in the sort of high-tech grow-box you see in movies about space stations.

What there was plenty of was late middle-aged men dressed up like prospectors who’d been thawed out of a glacier left over from Klondike days. They sported full beards and work boots, flannel shirts, and heavy-looking pants held up with suspenders. Their only sartorial concession to the 21st century was baseball caps advertising the names of equipment companies, which weren’t that much of a concession because the equipment they were advertising was as old-fashioned as the outfits. Row after row of sluice boxes. Pans. Picks. All the latest in 19th-century gold-mining technology. Pretty much anything you’d want if you were about to head on up to Dawson City in 1898.

Except, that is, for the gold magnets. Gold magnets weren’t part of any 19th-century prospector’s kit I know about. The fact is, I’m not persuaded that gold magnets should be part of any 21st-century kit, either. The idea of using magnetism to suck gold out of the ground doesn’t fit with anything I remember from high-school science; and, when I tried one on my wife’s wedding ring, it didn’t notice anything special. Which could go a long way toward explaining why these guys were at a trade show selling equipment rather than making their fortunes in the wilds of Alaska. But then, gold-rush fortunes are always made by the guys who sell the equipment.

Competitionwise, the Better Living Show picked a bad weekend to come to Portland. Marijuana fills the better-living bill for lots of people, and pretty much everybody thinks gold and treasure would go far toward making their living better, but almost nobody except city planners and the occasional overly enthusiastic wife imagines tiny houses could possibly make life better for anybody except slumlords, which left the Better Living Show a distant third attendancewise.

The people who put on that show seemed to share the general opinion and gave tiny houses the same pride of place as the Gold & Treasure Show gave gold coins: next to a wall on the far side of the room. There were two of them, both looking like the kind of place Red Riding Hood’s grandmother immigrated to America to escape from, once she’d been regurgitated by the wolf.

While the Gold & Treasure people were mostly pushing 19th-century mining gear, the marijuana people were selling stuff from a century that hasn’t even happened yet.

Also, they were culturally better suited to Red’s grandmother than to modern Americans. Medieval European peasants were minimalists in the way of possessions, and the houses were decorated in that style. Nothing was in them, including plumbing, so you had to imagine where the toilet and sink and shower would go, along with the furnace and water heater, which took some imagining because a tiny house doesn’t have space for much more than a single room with a fold-down bed, and the beds weren’t there, either. I would have gone into one for a better look, but I couldn’t get in. Somebody was already inside and I wouldn’t fit.

The vendors at the Better Living Show appeared to have a lot of spare time on their hands. The one I got to talking to seemed much more interested in the marijuana show next door than trying to sell me whatever he was supposed to be selling. He was elderly, almost as old as I am from the grizzled look of him. He’d grown up in Detroit and, like a lot of inner-city Americans, didn’t have any tolerance for drugs. But marijuana? He spent time volunteering with veterans and, well, he’d seen guys even older than himself cured, by drinking marijuana tea, of the neuropathy that goes along with type 2 diabetes.

Tea, he said. “If it’s tea it’s not a drug. “That show still there tomorrow?”

“Think so,” I said.

“I need to go find out about tea.”

The marijuana show wasn’t really about tea, although there were people there who probably could have told him. Maybe the munchie lady would have slipped him a recipe or two. What the marijuana show was about was selling you equipment, then selling you the knowledge you needed to use the equipment.

The marijuana show was about gleaming pipes and tubes and gauges and vats and dials that looked like they’d been left over from Breaking Bad. It was about grow lights and consultants to tell you how to save electricity once you’d bought the grow lights. It was about other consultants who knew how to maintain the optimum humidity, or the proper day-night cycles. It was about scary-looking machinery to extract hash oil from all the buds you’d be growing with all the grow boxes and humidity and day-night cycles. It was about consultants on indoor growing to tell you about nutrients and hydroponics, and about entirely different lines of equipment and consultants for people who wanted to make their fortunes growing marijuana outdoors. Underneath it all, it was about selling people who didn’t know the first thing about marijuana cultivation or marijuana processing the dream of turning into international marijuana kingpins.

If I’d had a lot of money, even if I’d had a lot more money than that, I still would have had to go into debt, yea, even unto the seventh generation, to get started in that business. But none of that debt would have made the least bit of difference in light of all the money that would be rolling in, once I got the business cranked up. It was pretty clear these people had had a lot of practice selling this line.

They were, when I thought about it, the same sort of people as the ones at the Gold & Treasure Show, except that, while the Gold & Treasure people were mostly pushing 19th-century mining gear, the marijuana people were selling stuff from a century that hasn’t even happened yet.

Something that nobody was selling was the statistics on what became of marijuana prices in Washington when weed went legal. Despite sellers up there having their state, Idaho, and the whole captive Portland market to themselves, the bottom fell out of their businesses. Too many who thought they were getting on the elevator at the ground floor wound up stepping into an empty shaft, only to get smashed flat when the elevator turned out to be heading down at them.

Try as I might, and I tried for half an hour, I couldn’t get a clear reason why weed farmers would want to unionize their workers.

It wasn’t as if there was nobody at the marijuana show who knew that. Or knew how to run a business in general. Several organizations had booths selling business-support services. One fellow claiming to provide this kind of expertise was a union leader trying to organize the workers on marijuana farms.

“But nobody here is planning to be a farm worker,” I told him.

“Plenty are planning to be growers, though,” he said. “I’m organizing growers, too.”

“You think growers want to join a union?”

“Their workers would. I’m organizing the growers so they can organize their workers.”

Try as I might, and I tried for half an hour, I couldn’t get a clear reason why farmers would want to unionize their workers. The best unclear reason involved keeping all the farms on the same playing field, which would keep prices for the product at a uniformly high level so that everybody, farmers and workers alike, would get rich. When I asked if his union planned to organize the illegal growers who are, when I thought about it, all the growers that exist right now, his answers became more unclear than usual. When I asked how anybody was going to get rich when marijuana doesn’t sell for any more than it’s selling for in Washington, he became even less clear.

A few booths over, a lady was touting a security service. “Marijuana businesses attract a lot of shady characters,” she said. “Owner needs to know who they are.”

Maybe, I thought, when marijuana is against the law. When it’s legal and cheap, shady characters are a lot more likely to hang around jewelry stores and places selling gold and treasure.

“You see a car in your parking lot with some shady characters inside,” she went on, “the last thing you want is to have to approach that car to find out who they are.”

Probably true I thought. Of any business.

“If you hire us, all you have to do is call with the tag number and we’ll tell you everywhere that car has been in the last few months.”

“You know that?”

“Sure. We get it from the street cameras. We can tell you within seconds everywhere that car has been.”

I knew about street cameras. Street cameras are one of things I talk about that make people think I’m some kind of anti-government crazy person, along with the thing I used to say about how the NSA records everybody’s phone calls and emails. I never expected the government would bother about something like a warrant when it wanted to check up on where my car had been, but I did think that calling up a specific license number would take a bit of trouble, like those operators tracing phone calls in old movies. And that, at the very least, the government would be embarrassed enough by the whole thing not to go making it any more public than it needed to. It never crossed my mind that you or I or a private security firm could tie directly into the street cameras and know where somebody else’s car had been. And do it within seconds.

I also couldn’t see how knowing where a car had been would tell you much about the people in the car. Unless the car turned out to be parked every night in a federal motor pool, which would tell you all you needed to know if you were running a marijuana outlet.

Which brings up the gentleman in the insurance booth. He was selling policies tailored for marijuana businesses. “Cover slip-and-fall. Product liability. Renter’s insurance to ease landlords’ concerns about leasing buildings to use as grow facilities. Theft. Bad debts. Acts of Government.”

Say what?

“Acts of Government. It’s not just what the thieves are planning that a businessman has to worry about, you know. It’s what the government has in mind, too.”

Now that’s something I could understand, at least until I thought about it. Insurance against acts of government was the one thing out of the whole trade-show lollapalooza, the one thing among all the fantasies of tiny houses and 19th-century gold-mining, of drive-you-to-the-poorhouse high-tech grow equipment and knowing where somebody else’s car has been, that made sense to me. Insurance against acts of government — that has . . .

That has . . . I don’t know. The things the government gets up to always turn out to be so far ahead of anything any sane person can imagine, I’m not sure what that guy was really selling. Could be he was no different from the other hucksters that morning. At the very least, he knew who his marks were.

Lots of people who use marijuana, and lots of people who would have wandered over from the Gold & Treasure Show, have their suspicions about acts of government. Could be he saw us coming.

Could be I’m the sort of guy who’d be suckered into the empty promise of a policy insuring me against acts of government in the same way those latter-day prospectors imagined they’d make their fortunes in Alaska, or those urban wannabe farmers and processors fancied there’s endless money to be had in marijuana.

Could well be something like that.

p/p

About this Author

Bill Merritt is a sometimes author in Portland, Oregon. Among his books are Where the Rivers Ran Backward, an account of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and Crackers, a memoir about growing up in the South during the Fifties and Sixties while not necessarily being part of the Civil Rights Revolution.